A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
The present invention relates in general to network security concern management and, in particular, to a system and method for providing trustworthy network security concern communication in an active security management environment.
Information networks interconnecting a wide range of computational resources have become a mainstay of corporate enterprise computing environments. Typically, several host computer systems are interconnected internally over an intranetwork to which individual workstations and network resources are connected. These intranetworks, also known as local area networks (LANs), make legacy databases and information resources widely available for access and utilization throughout the corporation. These same corporate resources can also be interconnected to wide area networks (WANs), including public information internetworks such as the Internet, to enable internal users access to remote computational resources, such as the World Wide Web (xe2x80x9cWebxe2x80x9d), and to allow outside users access to select corporate resources for the purpose of completing limited transactions or data transfer.
However, allowing outside users access to all internal corporate resources is risky and generally ill-advised. One approach to limiting access, and consequently, averting potential harm, structures a corporate intranetwork into separate network subdomains. For instance, network servers for providing Web content or file downloads, are located in an external subdomain while corporate servers containing non-public information are located in an internal subdomain. Thus, outside users are only able to access non-sensitive computing resources available in the external subdomain.
Most internetworks and intranetworks are based on a layered network model in which a stack of standardized protocol layers cooperatively exchange information between various systems. In particular, the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite, such as described in W.R. Stevens, xe2x80x9cTCP/IP Illustrated,xe2x80x9d Vol. 1, Ch. 1 et seq., Addison-Wesley (1994), the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference, is the most widely adopted network model. Computer systems and network devices employing the TCP/IP suite implement a protocol stack, which includes a hierarchically structured set of protocol layers beginning with the link protocol layer and proceeding upwards to the network, transport, and application protocol layers. Each protocol layer performs a set of pre-defined functions as specified by the official TCP/IP standards set forth in applicable Requests for Comment (RFC).
External and internal subdomains can be created through the use of firewalls which protect networks by filtering incoming and outgoing network traffic. Although effective at filtering out illicit requests, firewalls generally operate based on static configuration parameters loaded by a network administrator. A new generation of active security applications, such as the Net Tools Secure active security products suite, licensed by Network Associates, Inc., Santa Clara, Calif., adopt a proactive role in identifying security risks and vulnerabilities, formulating a suggested action, and, in some cases, executing the action. By design, the various components which make up such an active security products suite are distributed over the intranetwork within both internal and external subdomains. To be effective, these active security components must be able to communicate in a secure fashion. Non-secure communications create the potential for packet interception and corruption, also known as xe2x80x9cspoofing,xe2x80x9d which could cause, for instance, a set of recommended actions being sent from one component to another to be altered and rendered useless, or worse, to cause the recipient component to unwittingly open up a security risk.
Two complementary prior art approaches to providing secure communications are the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol and the Secure Hypertext Transport Protocol (S-HTTP), both described in R. Orfali, xe2x80x9cClient/Server Survival Guide,xe2x80x9d Ch. 9, John Wiley and Sons (3d ed. 1999), the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference. TLS creates a secured socket connection at the transport protocol layer that incorporates RSA public key authentication and encryption technologies. S-HTTP adds message-based security to ordinary HTTP packets also using RSA public key encryption and authentication. TLS provides security at the document level while S-HTTP ensures a secure communication channel. However, TLS nor S-HTTP are general purpose network security tools and neither is specifically designed to provide secure network security concern notifications and action recommendations in an active security environment.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach to providing secure communications between active security components operating in a distributed computing environment. Such an approach would guarantee the identity of the source of an active security message and the integrity of the message itself, thereby allowing proactive security measures to be exchanged and executed by distributed security application components.
The present invention provides a system and method for exchanging authenticated active security messages between a plurality of systems operating in an active security environment. Individual pairs of systems are designated as client and server systems. The client systems generate certograms upon the occurrence of a network event, upon the discovery of a weakness on a system operating within the active security environment, or similar security concern. The certograms include a suggested action to be taken responsive to the network security concern. A secure communications channel is established between the client system and a server system whereby the identity of both the client system and server system are authenticated. The certogram is processed by the server system which validates the identification of the client system and evaluates the certogram and action suggested therein.
An embodiment of the present invention is a system and a method for providing trustworthy network security concern communication in an active security management environment. A digital certificate including a validated server identifier for a server system is stored on a client system. A digital certificate including a validated client identifier for the client system is stored on the server system. A communications session between the client system and the server system is established. The communications session includes a secure socket connection authenticating each of the client system and the server system using the stored client digital certificate and the stored server digital certificate. A certogram is generated upon the occurrence of a network security concern within the active security management environment. The certogram encloses a notification of the network security concern occurrence and a suggested action responsive thereto within the certogram. The certogram is processed on the server system. The certogram is validated using the validated client identifier stored in the client digital certificate. The network security concern notification and the suggested action enclosed within the validated certogram are evaluated.
Still other embodiments of the present invention will become readily apparent to those skilled in the art from the following detailed description, wherein is described embodiments of the invention by way of illustrating the best mode contemplated for carrying out the invention. As will be realized, the invention is capable of other and different embodiments and its several details are capable of modifications in various obvious respects, all without departing from the spirit and the scope of the present invention. Accordingly, the drawings and detailed description are to be regarded as illustrative in nature and not as restrictive.